Paper productivity gains.

It won’t come as a surprise to anyone that better control of your business documents is a sensible strategy for any business. We know that, it’s fairly obvious but do we really understand all of the benefits or indeed the costs of not managing paper.

Sometimes we just can’t see the wood for the trees!

 

Paper issues may appear trivial to business owners and that's because we’re so used to being so swamped in paper that we don’t see or understand the negative implication that poor management of paper can have. We’re complacent about paper because it’s always been there.

According to a survey by YouGov, the UK’s small and medium-sized enterprises waste more than £42.2 million per day in revenues looking for documents, something that could easily be remedied by creating a ‘paperless office’. Despite this, 65% of UK SMEs have still not taken this step.

 

All businesses can struggle with productivity, an area where small gains are huge victories. Big business have the power to make significant infrastructure investments and also have people focused purely on process improvement.

Smaller businesses however have the potential for much bigger productivity gains which can be delivered much quicker due to their agile nature. Productivity improvement does not have to come with big financial investment, smaller businesses should focus on small process improvements and therefore managing paper better has to be top of the pile.

Make sure you set the right expectation, work towards a "Less Paper" office rather than a "Paper Less" office - isolate each paper process and improve it. Document scanning and management has got to be one of the easiest ways to introduce process improvement.  

Whoops, sorry your honour we shredded those by mistake!

More than 2,000 Alberta Court of Appeal records were accidentally shredded last year, says a provincial spokeswoman.

Boxes containing statements of fact and notice of motions were being transported to the Provincial Archives in Edmonton by Service Alberta when they were destroyed in July 2011, said Michelle Davio, spokeswoman for Alberta Justice. The 2,100 destroyed records were from criminal and civil cases from 1993 to 1995.

The records were with other files marked for destruction, said Gerald Kastendieck, spokesman for Service Alberta. "This is obviously an inadvertent destruction of those records."

Oh dear, but at least lessons learnt! Accidents happen but risks associated with inadvertently destroying paper can be mitigated with simple digital conversion.

http://tiny.cc/hh64iw

Disaster recovery – have you got everything covered?

Guess what, paper has no inherent provision for disaster recovery! Whilst many organisations have spent considerable time and effort planning for the worst the “elephant in the room” appears to be paper records and paper based processes.

So, whilst in many cases organisations might claim that they can have key personnel functioning in an offsite replica of their business with virtualised applications and recovered electronic content very few have made any contingency for paper.

The cold hard fact is that if a paper record is destroyed by fire, flood or any other natural disaster that it is the end of that record, there exists no recovery point.

One common miss-conception is that by storing important paper records in an off-site paper warehouse is in some way a disaster recovery policy for paper. This is totally erroneous as whilst many of these vast paper warehouses have very careful climate controlled areas with state of the art fire deterrents they are not unassailable. You may recall an incident in London some years back when fire damage destroyed millions of records at a well known paper storage business.

I’m sure that citing a fire or flood is not a legally acceptable reason for being unable to disclose a record, and in our litigious society that can amount to significant loss.

The truth is that if you have important content on paper that’s not backed up or managed in some sort of EDMS (Electronic Document Management System) you cannot really have a complete disaster recovery plan in place.

Content is content whether it’s paper or electronic, if it’s important you need to make provisions for it just in case the worst should happen.

Physical Protection:

2 out of 5 companies who experience disaster are out of business within 5yrs if they even if they have a plan(Gartner)

Business suffering incapacitating disaster with no DRP (Disaster Recovery Plan):

Ø  only 43% resume operations

Ø  of 43%, 29% still in business in 2 years

Ø  total of 71% out of business in 2 years

(Contingency Planning Research)

Minimise the risk of paper and convert to electronic content where replication can be managed.